by Sandra Brown
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“You said you wouldn’t arrest him until you had solid evidence. Does that mean—”
“All this means is that I wore my sergeant down. He agreed to me bringing Lozada in while we’re running our traps. If we get real lucky—and luck seems to be in short supply when we’re trying to nail Lozada—something incriminating will turn up.”
“I take it nothing has so far.”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. “We can’t hold him indefinitely without arraigning him, but we’ll drag it out for as long as possible. Unless we can collect some hard evidence to support Wick’s allegation, it would amount to a pissing contest in court. If the DA would even take it to court.”
“He would have to, wouldn’t he? If Wick identified Lozada as his attacker?”
“The DA’s office might be reluctant to take only Wick’s word for it to the grand jury. They would factor in the history between Wick and Lozada, which sorely reduces Wick’s credibility. Besides, they’re not too fond of him over there.”
“The DA’s office? How come?”
A cop poked his head though the door and spoke to Wesley. “He’s on his way to lockup.”
“I’m right behind you.”
The policeman withdrew. Rennie followed Wesley into her living room, where the candles still burned. Their scent was cloying. She went to one of her front windows and opened it so the room could air out. Several patrol cars were pulling away from the curb in front of her house, strobes flashing.
Pajama-clad neighbors had congregated on the sidewalk and were talking among themselves. Mr. Williams was in the middle of them, holding center stage and gesturing theatrically.
“How did you know Lozada was here, Detective? Are you still watching my house?”
“No. We got a call. Your neighbor. A Mr. Williams. Said something weird was going on.”
God, this was a nightmare.
Wesley stood in the center of the room, taking a slow look around. The roses didn’t escape his notice. When he finally came back around to Rennie, he said, “I talked to a hospital board member today. He said you had accepted the position vacated by Dr. Howell.”
Her chin went up a notch. “I gave them my decision this afternoon. After my meeting with you. I didn’t see that accepting made any difference. You were going to continue believing that I hired Lozada to kill Lee whether I took it or not.”
He gestured toward the roses. “Congratulations.”
“This wasn’t a celebration, if that’s what you’re thinking. All this was here when I arrived home from the hospital. He broke in again.”
“You didn’t call to report it.”
“I didn’t have a chance.”
He looked down at her rumpled clothing. “He was terrorizing me,” she exclaimed. “He has this, this mad notion that I’m going to become his lady love.” She told him everything that Lozada had said to her, even the most embarrassing parts. “He manhandled me. He thought I might be wearing a wire.”
“A wire?”
“When I mentioned Lee Howell’s murder, he searched me. He was afraid I was working for you to try to trap him.”
“Well, we both know how wrong that is.”
Disliking his snide tone, she said, “Detective, I did not invite him here. Why would you automatically assume that I had?”
“Did you break something?”
“In the bathroom. He’d left another of those bouquets in my bathtub. I was so angry I knocked it over.”
“Mr. Williams was in his backyard waiting for his dog to do his business. He heard the crash and tried to call you, see if you were okay.” Wesley spied the cordless telephone on the end table.
Rennie picked it up, then held it out toward Wesley. There was no dial tone. It had been disconnected for so long that the obnoxious beeping alert had played itself out.
“I guess he didn’t want to be disturbed,” she said quietly.
“I guess not.”
She returned the telephone to its usual place on the table, then drew her hand back quickly. “Should I have touched that?”
“He doesn’t have fingerprints. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. We already know that Lozada was here, and this isn’t a crime scene.”
“Since when did breaking and entering stop being a crime? He came in and made himself at home.”
“Yeah. Mr. Williams told the nine-one-one dispatcher that he looked right at home. After reporting the disturbance, he said, ‘Wait, never mind, I can see her and a man through the kitchen window. It appears that nothing’s wrong, that she knows him very well.’ Something like that. However, this dispatcher was on the ball. She recognized your name and address, knew I—”
“Had been spying on me.”
“So she called me. Said she’d just had a curious nine-one-one from your neighbor. You and a man were getting it on in the kitchen.”
“Hardly how I would describe it. I was afraid if I resisted I would wind up like Sally Horton.”
“You might have.”
“Then why do you always put me on the defensive?”
He only looked at her before turning away. “I need to be on my way.”
As he headed for the door she rushed after him, grabbed his arm, and brought him around. “I deserve an answer, Detective.”
“Fine. Here’s my answer,” he said tightly. “You haven’t given me any reason to trust you, Doctor, but you’ve given me a lot of reasons not to.”
“What would convince you I’m telling the truth? Would you have been convinced if Lozada had killed me tonight?”
“Not really,” he returned with a blasé shrug. “Before Sally Horton became his victim, she was his lover.”
Chapter 20
“He wants only to make her happy.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Stop looking at me like that, Wick,” Oren complained. “I didn’t say it. She said he said it.”
Wick had stayed in ICU for two days. For the past five, he’d been in a private room that afforded a view of the downtown skyline. He was able to lie on his back now. It still hurt like hell, especially when he was forced to get up and walk around, which was at least twice a day.
Each of those hikes, as he called them, was an ordeal equivalent to climbing Everest. It took him five minutes just to get out of bed. At first he was able only to shuffle around his room, but earlier today he had managed to make it to the end of the hall and back, which the nursing staff claimed was a major breakthrough. Big woo. They commended his progress. He cursed and asked them where they stored their Nazi uniforms. When he returned to bed, he was sweating and feeling as helpless as a newborn.
He looked forward to the pain medication that was regularly dispensed. It didn’t eliminate the pain but made it tolerable. He could live with it if he didn’t think about it too much and focused on something else. Like Lozada.
This morning he’d been taken off the IV. He’d been glad to get rid of it, but then the nurses had begun bullying him to take in lots of fluids. They brought him fruit juice in little plastic cups with foil lids. He hadn’t succeeded in opening one yet without spilling half of it.
“Are you eating?” Oren asked.
“Some. A little. I’m not hungry. Besides, you wouldn’t believe the crap they try to pass off as food.”
His cheek was still the color of an eggplant going bad, but the swelling had gone down enough for him to see out of both eyes. For instance, he could see that Oren’s eyebrow was in its critical-arch position. “What?” he asked grouchily.
“How’re your privates?”
“Fine thanks, how’re yours?” For several uncomfortable days he had straddled an ice pack, but, as Rennie had promised, his balls had returned to their normal size.
“You know what I mean,” Oren said.
“They’re okay. Wanna check ’em out?”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Oren shifted his weight from one foot to the other. �
��I haven’t had a chance to tell you. I’m sorry about your chin.”
“Least of my problems.”
“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“I struck first.”
“Stupid of both of us. I apologize.”
“Noted and accepted. Now get back to what you were saying about Lozada and his fixation on Rennie.”
“I’ve told you already,” Oren complained.
“Tell me again.”
“Jesus, you’re cranky. They haven’t taken the catheter out yet, have they?”
“This afternoon. If I can pee they’ll leave it out.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I can. I will. If I have to squeeze it out, I’ll pee. No way are they putting that thing back in while I’m conscious. I’d jump out the window first.”
“You’re such a crybaby.”
“Are you going to tell me or what?”
“I’ve told you. I’ve repeated it word for word several times. The neighbor said they looked cozy with each other. Dr. Newton says that Lozada was terrorizing her, that she was afraid to fight him off for fear that he would do to her what he’d done to Sally Horton.”
Wick sank back into his pillow and closed his eyes. The reminder of what had happened to that girl was painful. He would never forget seeing her lying dead. While he’d been enjoying a shower, she had been killed in cold blood.
Leaving his eyes closed, he said, “She makes sense, Oren. Lozada’s a threat to her. Especially if he thinks it comes down to a choice between him and me, and she’s favoring me.”
“I don’t suppose she’s talked to you about it.”
“No. If you hadn’t told me what went down the other night, I wouldn’t even know about it.”
He couldn’t figure Rennie’s attitude, and that was the primary reason he was so grumpy. Yeah, he hurt. Yeah, the food was lousy. Yeah, he was ready to be peeing on his own. Yeah, he didn’t like walking around bare-assed and feeble.
But what really had him bothered was Rennie’s aloofness. She came in every morning and every evening, usually with her head down, her eyes on his chart rather than on him. “How are you, Mr. Threadgill?” Always the same ho-hum inflection.
She gave his incision a cursory inspection, asked how he was feeling and nodded absently to whatever answer he gave her, like she wasn’t really listening and didn’t really give a damn. She told him that she was pleased with his progress, then smiled mechanically and left. He realized that he wasn’t her one and only patient. He didn’t really expect preferential treatment.
Well, maybe he did. A little.
He’d been heavily medicated when he was in the ICU, but he remembered her sitting near his bedside and giving him sips of Sprite. He remembered her applying the lip balm. He remembered the way they had looked at each other and how long that look had lasted and how significant it had seemed.
Or had any of that actually happened?
Maybe he’d been so drugged out he’d been hallucinating. Had it been a pleasant dream he’d mistaken for reality? Possibly. Because that was, after all, the night Oren had caught her and Lozada in a “cozy” clinch in her kitchen.
Damned if he knew what was going on with her.
“When she’s on her rounds she’s all business,” he told Oren. “We haven’t even talked about the weather.”
“It’s hot and dry.”
“Looks it.”
“She took that chief of surgery position.”
“I heard,” Wick said. “Good for her. She’s earned it.” Oren continued to look at him meaningfully. “That doesn’t signify anything, Oren.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“You didn’t have to.”
A nurse came in with another container of juice. “I’ll drink it later,” he told her. “I promise.” She didn’t look convinced, but she set it on the bed tray and left. He offered the juice to Oren.
“No thanks.”
“Cranberry apple.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look too healthy yourself.” Oren had arrived looking wilted not only from the summertime heat, but ragged out in spirit as well. “What’s up?”
Oren shrugged, sighed, glanced out the window at the hazy view before coming back to Wick. “The DA called about an hour ago. The big cheese himself. Not an assistant.”
Wick had guessed that Oren’s glumness had something to do with their case against Lozada. If he’d had good news to impart, he would have imparted it before now.
Discomfort made getting bad news worse. He adjusted himself to a more comfortable position that favored his sore right side. “Let’s hear it.”
“He says that what we’ve got on Lozada is weak. Not enough to take to the grand jury. In any case, he refused to.”
Wick had guessed as much. “He came to see me yesterday. A pillar of goodwill and good cheer right down to his Italian loafers. Brought those.” He gestured at a tacky bouquet of red, white, and artificially blue carnations.
“He went all out.”
“I gave him a full account of what happened the night I was stabbed. Told him that as sure as I was still breathing, it was Lozada.”
“How’d he react?”
“Let’s see, he tugged at his turkey wattle, scratched his temple, rubbed his gut, frowned, expelled his breath through his pursed lips, and winced several times. He looked like a guy who had gas and was trying to figure out a polite way to fart. He told me that I was making some serious allegations. ‘Well, no shit,’ says I. ‘Murder and attempted murder are pretty fucking serious.’ He had trouble looking me in the eye as he left. He didn’t come right out and say it—”
“He’s not a politician for nothing.”
“But I gathered from all his seeming distress that he had problems with my story.”
“He did.”
“Such as?”
“I won’t bore you with the details,” Oren said. “God knows he bored me with them. For about thirty minutes he stammered and stuttered, and did that bellows bit with his cheeks, but basically…”
“No soap.”
Oren fiddled with the tricolored satin ribbon tied around the ugly carnations. He glanced at Wick askance. “You gotta look at it from his standpoint, Wick.”
“The hell I do! Until he has to have six units of blood, until his nuts swell to the size of bowling balls and he’s got a tube shoved up his dick, don’t talk to me about his standpoint.”
“I know you’re gonna be pissed when I say this—”
“So don’t.”
“When it comes right down to it, he’s right.”
“If I could slug you right now, I would.”
“I knew you’d get pissed.” Oren sighed. “Look, Wick, the DA plays it safe, yes, but—”
“He’s a pussy!”
“Maybe, but he’s justified this time. When you boil it down, we’ve got nothing hard on Lozada.”
“Lozada,” Wick sneered. “He’s got everybody running scared, doesn’t he? You think he’s not laughing his ass off at us?”
Oren gave him several seconds to cool off before continuing. “Everything in our hopper is circumstantial. Lozada knows you. He knew Sally Horton. That’s a link, but it doesn’t provide motivation. If, by some weird fluke, the grand jury did indict him, we could never make a case out of that. I was given three days to come up with something. Same as always, he didn’t leave a trace. I’ve got nothing.”
“Except my word on it.”
Oren looked pained. “The DA factored in your background with Lozada. He hasn’t forgotten what happened. That reduces your credibility.”
Arguing a point so blatantly valid would be futile.
Oren sat down on the green vinyl armchair and stared at the floor. “I’ve got no choice but to release him. It wasn’t easy, but I got search warrants. We’ve tossed his place. Nothing. Clean as a freaking whistle. Even his scorpions look sanitary. His car, same thing
. Not a trace of blood, fibers, anything. We’ve got the weapons, but they could belong to anybody. No eyewitnesses except you, and you’ve been discredited. Besides, by your own account, you didn’t actually see him.”
“I was too busy leaking blood into my gut.”
“His lawyer is already making a hell of a racket about police harassment. He says—”
“I don’t want to hear what he says. I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about that son of a bitch’s civil rights being violated, okay?”
A long silence ensued. After a time, Oren glanced toward the corner near the ceiling. “TV work all right?”
Wick had muted the sound when Oren came in. The picture was little more than colored snow, but images could be detected if you looked hard enough. “Sucks. No cable.”
They stared at the silent program for several moments before Oren asked if it was a good show.
“Those two are mother and daughter,” Wick explained. “The daughter slept with the mother’s husband.”
“Her father?”
“No, about her fourth stepfather. Her real father is the father. The parish priest. But nobody knows that except her mother and the priest. He hears his daughter’s confession about boinking her mother’s husband and freaks out. He blames the mother for being a bad influence, calls her a slut. But he’s guilt-ridden because he hasn’t been there for his daughter. As a father—I mean as a dad. He’s been her priest since he christened her. It’s sorta complicated. He went to her house, for christsake.” Wick’s last statement didn’t relate to the soap opera, but Oren knew that.
“I can’t rule out the possibility that she invited him there, Wick.”
He didn’t even honor that with a comeback. He let his hard stare say it all.
“I said it’s only a possibility.” Averting his head, Oren muttered something else that Wick didn’t catch.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“He was feeling her tit. Okay?”
He wished he hadn’t asked, but he had. He’d pressured Oren into telling him, and Oren had, and now he was gauging Wick’s reaction. He kept his expression as passive as possible. “She was afraid to fight him off.”